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Hard not to fall in love with Moscovitch’s ‘Bunny’

Krystin Pellerin, left, as Maggie and Maev Beaty as Sorrel star in 'Bunny,' Sarah Moscovitch's latest play receiving its world premiere at the Stratford Festival. (David Hou / David Hou)

Maev Beaty as Sorrel and David Patrick Flemming as Angel star in 'Bunny.' In Beaty’s constantly capable hands, Sorrel begins and stays on the audience’s good side even when everyone should know better. (David Hou / David Hou)

By Carly MagaTheatre Critic

Mon., Aug. 22, 2016

Bunny

Written by Hannah Moscovitch. Directed by Sarah Garton Stanley. Until Sept. 24 at the Studio Theatre, 34 George Street East, Stratford. StratfordFestival.ca or 1-800-567-1600.

Bunny is a romance. What’s more, it’s sexy. But the romance often isn’t erotic and the sex isn’t always romantic. But in its messiness, this story of desire, morality and connection is hard not to fall in love with.

As both a love letter to and a reaction against the Victorian novels she loved as an adolescent, playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s newest work, commissioned by and receiving its world premiere at the Stratford Festival, flips the usual narrative of the Jane Austen heroine.

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At its core is Sorrel (Maev Beaty), similar to the typical Austen female as beautiful, intelligent and quirky, dissimilar in that she’s completely out of touch with the culture around her, incapable of quashing her bawdy appetites and about a thousand times more socially awkward. In fact, her journey throughout the play chronicles her own coming-to-terms with the fact that she’s not the idealistic ingénue of the novels she loves.

Raised by a family of anticapitalistic academics — the kind that would name their child after an unassuming, slightly tart leafy green — she grew up with gender-neutral toys, philosophical arguments around the dinner table and books as her only friends. Though the family “disapproved of beauty,” Sorrel suddenly becomes a “hot dork” at 17, which puts her at the contradictory crossroads of being painfully socially awkward, surrounded by interested boys and genuinely enjoying exploring her sensual side with as many of them as possible.

As Sorrel grows up, enrolls in college and eventually becomes a literature professor (specializing in the Victorians), the play plots out the details of the major relationships in her life. The vast majority of them are with men — her high school boyfriend and the captain of the football team Justin (Emilio Vieira), her married college professor Ethan (Cyrus Lane), her businessman-turned-politician husband Carol (Tim Campbell) and a young friend-of-a-friend Angel (David Patrick Flemming). All men are excellently cast and pair well with Beaty.

Sorrel’s relationships with other women take up much less real estate in the play, but are the ever-present driving force in her life. Her initial naiveté about sexuality is charming — she doesn’t realize other people can hear her orgasms — but it’s ultimately traumatizing for her, especially when her female classmates torment and shun her for her promiscuity.

“Rejection sticks to your skin,” she says, and maybe if her brain wasn’t so wired for analytics maybe her skin would be more like Teflon. This punishment for her “improper” sexual expression is something she desperately tries to avoid through the entire play, even though her decisions become more and more morally challenging. It’s even the whole reason that the play exists. Through Moscovitch’s signature confessional monologues, broken up by characters who come in and out of Sorrel’s spiel (upon Michael Gianfrancesco’s green grass set), Sorrel turns her life’s story into a mea culpa, as if she’s still trying to win the friendship of the cheerleading team.

Sorrel does manage to make one female friend in Maggie (Krystin Pellerin), and that’s just fine, because she’s the kind of friend that’s so giving and supportive that you only need one. The telling of Sorrel’s story is also a testament to this relationship, as Maggie attempts to help her friend unlearn the shame from her past (not to mention all the other societal voices telling her that sex without love is wrong).

Another reason why Sorrel spends so much of the play in the company of men is because they’re easier for her, she can handle them. They get as tongue-tied around her as Sorrel does around Maggie. Her friendship with Maggie is more fragile and more important, but it also scares Sorrel into inaction until it’s almost too late.

Her spoken autobiography is a mea culpa but also a working-out of how to reconcile her desire for love and connection without stifling her natural desire for sex (even, gasp, after having kids) in the form she understands best — a Victorian romance. Because all the major elements are there: wit, class politics, trysts, suppressed desire, a matchmaker, death, urban life and a country oasis. Only this time the happy ending doesn’t come with a marriage (let’s face it, Sorrel was probably never meant for a happy marriage), but another heart-wrenching expression of love and acceptance. And if it’s still unclear who the most significant person in Sorrel’s life is, look at the titular “Bunny,” Sorrel’s nickname, and who gave her that affectionate moniker.

As the play has been in the works with Stratford for a while, it may have been written with Beaty in mind to play Sorrel from the beginning — if not, this was a serendipitous match. Beaty straddles all of the complicated sides of Sorrel with ease: the confident if guilt-ridden storyteller, the insecure teen, the bold lover, the apprehensive friend and the conflicted wife.

Despite giving Sorrel more confidence and maturity as the play progresses, she still maintains a few quirks from childhood, like how she scrunches her face in self-deprecation and humiliation after saying the wrong thing in public, again. In Beaty’s constantly capable hands, Sorrel begins and stays on the audience’s good side even when everyone should know better.

Bunny may be Moscovitch’s most personal play yet, who shares her main character’s love of books and her academic, left-wing family. She may be at odds with her previous devotion to Jane Austen and her colleagues in her youth, but it has resulted in a beautiful play with one of the strongest female leads Stratford has seen in recent years. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

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